A few weeks ago we hosted a conference at Habla called "Education and the Imaginative Mind." I needed to give a talk at the conference about imagination and I was looking through my file of photographs and my archives of student work for the perfect example. I didn't find it.
Then today, I visited our class of five to seven year olds and there it was, the perfect example of a teacher engaging the students' imaginations ; it's too late for the talk, so instead I'll share it here.
Led by their teacher, Dani Evia Duarte, the students had been exploring the concept of sustainable ecology through literature and art. They read the classic Dr. Seuss book The Lorax and another book we've found recently The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. The students walked around the gardens of Habla and discussed how they could make the school greener by planting more trees and plants.
Each student painted an abstract, Jackson Pollack-like painting of what they imagined a green world might look like. They then cut up the paintings and decorated a jar with the remaining fragments. "In this jar," their teacher explained, "you will be able to create the green future of Habla. You will plant a seed, and that seed will grow into a large plant or tree. You will have your very own garden and we will watch it grow together."
Now already I loved the concept and the way the teacher was investigating it through a rich mix of literature, science, and art. It was the next step that particularly captured my attention. Dani asked me to take photographs of all the students holding their jars. We printed the photographs in black and white and regular copy paper, and handed them back to the students. Dani said, "Now you get to imagine the plant that will grow from the seed out of your jar. Draw what you think will happen." The students enthusiastically began sketching what they thought the future of their plant might be, or even better, imagined otherworldly ones, strange and wonderful, growing around and out of their photographs.
Habla has been working with Chicago Arts Partnership's creative director Arnold Aprill and Chicago photographer Morris Bowie on the idea of displacement in art making. Arnold Aprill writes:
Moving a concept or story across media, or displacing a narrative across narrators, or across time and space, seems to consistently accelerate the level of creativity and expressiveness of both writing and art-making.
In this example, the students created an expressive painting, cut it up and recreated it in the form of a jar, posed for a portrait with the jar, then remade their portrait again by imagining colors and shapes emanating from the jar and around the photograph. The student's work traveled across mediums and even artists (a photographer captured the image of them holding their artwork) leading to a complex, layered product. This continual remaking and recreating helped to deepen and enrich the creative process and it led to extraordinary work from our young artists.
